I liked Futurman's interview here on Rock OM so much, I decided to get a tattoo of it.  It's a bass clef designed using golden spiral that's based on the Fibonacci sequence.  The background is a golden rectangle.

I created the basic design by writing a computer program that used the Fibonacci sequence to generate the spiral, clef outline, and dots.  I used the golden ratio to size the dots and position them from the edge of the golden  rectangle that borders the golden spiral.  The tattoo artist tweaked the outline a bit, and added a stone background to the rectangle.  He also added the biblical citation "Rom 1:20" in the corner.



This post is a response to The featured article "Futureman, Pythagorean Societies and the Big Orgasm" as featured in June (for Part 1) and July (for Part 2).  These are my thoughts, and not necessarily the intention of the interviewer or Futureman.

Part 1:
  http://www.rockom.net/articles/2008/06/ … -article-1
Part 2:
  http://www.rockom.net/articles/2008/07/ … art-2-of-2

Futureman seems to spin off on multiple tangents, but these thoughts really do tie together in a profound way.  Futureman has recognized that the wisdom of the ancients is not something we should think of as outdated superstition.  This goes cross-grain with much of modern intellectual thought.  We live in a time where intellectual disciplines are separated and specialized.  We've lost the idea that everything is connected.

I first heard Futureman speak at his brother's bass/nature camp outside of Nashville.  My fellow campers were entranced by Futureman's eloquent speach and bold statements.  This really angered me.  I did not like that he was filling the minds of impressionable young people with crazy sounding talk.  I truly wanted to discredit him.  I've seen many times in life where people are bold, smooth, and wrong.  Truth should be able to stand on its own and not be dependant on the skills of a salesman.  Since Futureman's speach was very different from anything I heard before, I figured it would be easy to point out where he was wrong.

As it turns out, Futureman knows what he is saying.  The implications of his message are quite deep.

Our society has learned to separate science and theology.  When we want to learn how things actually are, we turn to science.  We only turn to God when we need emotional support.  In the aftermath of the Colombine shootings in 1999, we watched interviews of Neurologists who explained how the minds of killers work.  Interviews with theologians were limited to how they approach grief counseling with the families of the victims.  No one even thought to ask the theologians to explain how people become killers.

When I was a child in the 1970's, we used to watch Carl Sagan's show Cosmos.  Every show started out the same.  The voice of Carl Sagan would say "The cosmos is all that is or ever was or ever will be".  No one I knew noticed or cared that this phrasing was similar to the Gloria Patri: "Glory be to the Father, and to the Son and to the Holy Ghost. As it was in the beginning, is now, and ever shall be, world without end. Amen.".  We did church like many other families, but the idea of church making a difference in our lives was pretty far removed from our thoughts.

The idea of the golden mean is not particularly controversial, particularly it's use in art and architecture.  Since the ratio lends itself to beauty and proportion, it makes sense that people would figure out how to use the ratio to their advantage.  The problem comes into play with nature.  The use of the golden ratio in nature should either be coincidental, necessary, or advantageous.  The Golden ratio seems to occur far too often to be coincidental.  A universe that favors the golden ratio is not necessary.  Even if the golden ratio was necessary to support life, it is not necessary according to Sagan's philosophy to have a universe that supports life at all.  The ratio does not seem to provide survival advantages either.  We are basically stuck with the idea that the golden ratio is intended to bring beauty to the universe.  That's a pretty tough concept for those of us who were raised to believe that the cosmos is all there is, was, or ever will be.

As Carl Sagan was cosmology's intellectual giant, Richard Dawkins represents the highest thinking in evolutionary biology.  Dawkins opens his landmark book "The Selfish Gene" with the following statement:

"Intelligent life on a planet comes of age when it first works out the reason for its own existence.  If superior creatures from space ever visit earth, the first question they will ask, in order to assess the level of our civilization is: 'Have they discovered evolution yet?'.  Living organisms had existed on earth, without ever knowing why, for over three thousand million years before the truth finally dawned on one of them.  His name was Charles Darwin."

   - "The Selfish Gene" by Richard Dawkins, p. 1, Oxford University Press

The statements of Dawkins, Sagan, and Futureman puts us in a strange position.  Who are we to believe -- highly educated and trained scientists, or a grammy award winning drummer who dresses funny?  More importantly, what are we to do when the best evidence comes from the drummer and not the scientists?  Do we reject the messenger as I wanted to do at bass/nature camp, or do we conform our thinking based on the evidence?  The idea of creation as a "big orgasm" is somewhat creepy, but Futureman does make a great point.  The creation of the universe is an incridible event that words fail to describe.  It's far more then a series of unlikely events balanced on a razor's edge.  On either side of the razor is a universe that cannot sustain life.  Did we just get lucky?

Perhaps the better question to ask is why we reject ancient words and teaching in favor of the latest wave of popular thinking.  Albert Einstein once said "Nature hides her secrets because of her essential loftiness, but not by means of ruse.".  Einstein recognized that God's fingerprints and signatures are all over nature.  Einstein did not appear to have the conflict with spirituality and science that is evident in the work of Sagan and Dawkins.

the book of Romans has this passage:

For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse. (Romans 1:20, NIV).

Digging a bit deeper, I have to ask; what kind of creator would put his/her fingerprints and signatures on nature?  That would only make sense for a creator that desires to be recognized.  A creator who wishes to have a relationship with his creation.  This falls dead center with a creator who would come to earth incarnated as a man (yet fully divine), teach us how to live, and ultimately defeat sin and death so we may be united in eternity.

We all have the choice to accept God's invisible qualities based on what we observe that has been made.  We cannot see wind or magnetic fields, but we experience what they do, so we know they are real.  The same is with God.

The greater context of Romans 1:20 is found within Romans 1:16-25:

I am not ashamed of the gospel, because it is the power of God for the salvation of everyone who believes: first for the Jew, then for the Gentile. For in the gospel a righteousness from God is revealed, a righteousness that is by faith from first to last, just as it is written: "The righteous will live by faith."

The wrath of God is being revealed from heaven against all the godlessness and wickedness of men who suppress the truth by their wickedness, since what may be known about God is plain to them, because God has made it plain to them. For since the creation of the world God's invisible qualities—his eternal power and divine nature—have been clearly seen, being understood from what has been made, so that men are without excuse.

For although they knew God, they neither glorified him as God nor gave thanks to him, but their thinking became futile and their foolish hearts were darkened. Although they claimed to be wise, they became fools and exchanged the glory of the immortal God for images made to look like mortal man and birds and animals and reptiles.

Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another. They exchanged the truth of God for a lie, and worshiped and served created things rather than the Creator — who is forever praised. Amen.

Last edited by ToddF (2008-08-26 20:37:11)